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3. March 2010 – 13:38 by John Heaven
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My name is John Heaven and I started work at TuTech Innovation on 1st March 2010. I will be working on - amongst other things - PEP-NET. Part of my role will be to work together with Bengt Feil on establishing what members would like to get out of PEP-NET membership, how we can improve what we offer to them, and ultimately ensure that PEP-NET can support itself into the future.
But before I set about that, I thought maybe you’d like to hear about where I’m from and what I’ve been doing until now, especially around eParticipation!
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Uncategorized, good practice | 4 Comments »
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1. July 2009 – 09:04 by International Teledemocracy Centre
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Online petitioning is one of the oldest forms of e-participation around - in Scotland’s case it has been part of the political system for 10 years now. Partly to mark the 10 years of operation, the Scottish Parliament on 16 June 2009 published the report of a year-long inquiry by the Public Petitions Committee into the public petitions process, including its e-Petitioner system. This inquiry looked at how to improve awareness of the existence of the public petitions process, particularly amongst hard to reach groups; participation in the process itself; and the scrutiny role fulfilled by the Committee. For practitioners, it gives an insight into how a maturing e-participation technology is incorporated into the political process.
There are a number of interesting observations and recommendations: one highlight for me is the emphasis on physically holding meetings around the country, involving community workers, and also using former petitioners as ambassadors for the process.
e-Petitions are treated as just another route to get your voice heard:
“86. …it must be recognised that technology is only an enabler of participation and therefore it is not axiomatic that increased engagement will occur as a consequence of new technology. ICTs should be used as a means of enhancing traditional methods of engagement.”
(ITC was involved in the development of the e-Petitioner system in 1999, and I am now involved in the EuroPetition project that carries many of the ideas forward).
The petitions committee has identified the need for a “coherent strategy” for the introduction of video, blogging and other Web2.0 technologies by the Scottish Parliament’s petitions committee, and set up a new blogspot blog and produced a new petitions DVD. I believe this shows a real willingness to learn by the politicians.
Finally, I’d recommend taking 8 minutes to watch the excellent video (Windows Media format) on this blog entry. It explains how the petitioning process works from petitioners’ and politicians’ viewpoints and has some nice stories about how this form of petitioning increases engagement with politics.
- Peter Cruickshank
Posted in Tools, good practice | No Comments »
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7. January 2009 – 11:01 by Bengt Feil
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The Home Office in Great Britain adapted a plan which allows “police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant” according to the Times Online. This kind of remote search allows both police and MI5 officers to examine suspects’ hard drives, to install keylogging software or infect the targeted computer with other kinds of malware (viruses, rootkits etc.). This can be done to a suspect’s computer at home, in the office or in a hotel room. The plan for remote search in GB is based on a decision of the Council of ministers of the European Union from late 2008 which suggests adapting “operational measures, such as cyber patrols, joint investigation teams and remote searches to become part of the fight against cybercrime in the next five years”. I already discussed this decision and its possible negative implementations for privacy and internet freedom in an earlier article.
As the plan in GB is an adaptation of the Council of ministers decision it can be seen as a blueprint for similar laws in other EU states. Therefore it makes sense to take a look at what it allows officers to do:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Trends | No Comments »
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2. December 2008 – 19:59 by Rolf Luehrs
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Just found some interesting figures about the number of local authorities in different European countries:
As is increasingly recognised, UK local government already operates on a scale that would prompt most democratic countries to put inverted commas around ‘local’. Our 468 principal local authorities for the 60 million of us equate to an average population of 128,000, or one councillor for every 2,730 residents.
The 60 million French get over half a million councillors in their 36,700 communes alone – one for every 120 of them. The Swedes get one per 200, the Germans one per 420, the Spanish and Italians one per 600, and again these ratios are for only the most local tier in 2- or 3-tier local government systems.
Take away England’s current 34 shire counties – as the Government has already started to – and England’s most local tier of 354 district, borough and unitary councils has an average population of over 140,000. By comparison, the commune/municipality average in France is 1,600, in Spain 5,000, in Germany and Italy about 7,000, and even in recently restructured Denmark about 50,000. (opendemocracy.net)
The author, Chris Game, argues that the plans of the British Government to further enlarge the counties will increase the already perceived democratic deficit. Maybe eGovernment and eParticipation helped to mitigate the consequences?
Posted in Trends | 4 Comments »
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27. November 2008 – 12:17 by Rolf Luehrs
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Nine projects working to engage people in local and national decision-making have won funding from the government’s Building Democracy Innovation Fund, five of which are eParticipation projects:
- Yoosk.com: An online question time linking the public with local and central government.
(Run by Thumbsize Ltd.)
- UK Feedback: An online forum for feedback about public services
- LocalEyes – The ‘Voice’: A web-based consultation tool to enable defined groups to have their say in decision making.
(Run by The Shire Initiative.)
- All Hansard on TheyWorkForYou.com: To add the pre-2001 Hansard data to TheyWorkForYou.com, and build exploratory tools.
(Run by MySociety.)
- Empowering the blind citizen: Providing training and tools to enable blind and partially sighted people to participate in e-democracy.
(Run by Screenreader.net Community Interest Company.)
Find the complete list of the winning projects at epractice.eu
Posted in Projects, good practice | No Comments »
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25. November 2008 – 12:31 by Alice Chicken - 21c
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The main online story in the UK this week has come from an unlikely quarter. You might think it would be about Labour’s revival in the polls or the ongoing financial meltdown. Perhaps US President-elect Obama’s continued online engagement via email and YouTube. Maybe even the closing down of one of the biggest email spam outfits in the world. But no, the main story has been a British couple’s divorce over Second Life.
Amy Taylor and David Pollard met in Second Life in 2003 and married both online and in real life in 2005. However, the marriage has since fallen apart after Amy caught David’s character with a call girl and then having an affair with another character in the game. The story has caught the British press’ imagination and had led to some rather unkind stories about the pair (they’re both obese and computer game addicted, making them an easy target).
However, these events do lead us to a more serious question – where does the online world end and real life begin?
The couple in question met via Second Life and got to know each other through their characters in the game. By all accounts, much of the ‘quality time’ they spent together was done in Second Life. So is it reasonable to assume that an affair in Second Life is every bit as real as one in the off-line world?
Second Life, like many other online games, has a thriving economy attached, both within the game and in the real world. Players can both earn and lose money through their online actions.
Even Public Administrations are getting in on the act, with Manchester Council and the British Council setting up areas to encourage the gaming community to get involved in politics and democracy.
But has it all gone too far? Are the British tabloids right to poke fun at two people who seem to spend their lives in online worlds rather than the real world? Should we be worried about obsessive gamers losing money in cyberspace at a time when most people are saving pennies in the face of very real financial crises? And should Public Administrations be spending time and resources reaching out to online gamers – a population who are likely to be internet-savvy and literate and therefore not exactly hard to reach – when they could be reaching out to the genuinely socially excluded?
In short, is the obsession with having a ‘Second Life’ getting in the way of having a real life and should we care?
Posted in News | 3 Comments »
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24. September 2008 – 09:29 by Bengt Feil
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On September 15th the Participatory Budgeting Unit, a project by the Church Action against Poverty, organized the first National PB conference in Manchester (UK). For a short introduction to the topic the PB Unit does explain Participatory Budgeting and the reasons why it should be done very well on their website. I was at the event as one of the few non UK citizens and therefore had kind of an outsiders look on what is going on over there. I would like to talk about a few of these impressions.
The first significant fact was that an estimate of 250 representatives of mainly public bodies and councils took part in an event which was focus on what is still a niche topic. This shows that the interest in Participatory Budgeting in the UK is strong and that we can assume that there will be a number of new towns and quarters who start using PB in the next years. I had the opportunity to speak to some of the representatives of cities who already use PB and they were very clear in stating that they will keep up their efforts and that PB has to be a long term process which can not be done “right” at the first try.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Trends, TuTech | 2 Comments »
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16. September 2008 – 16:12 by Dan Jellinek
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I’ve never been a big fan of blogs.
Partly it was the word – there is a type of geek-techie who just loves to use a new word that no-one has ever heard of, just as everyone gets used to the old word – intranet, blog, web 2.0, whatever – as a way of singling themselves out as knowledgeable insiders. In the early days, that’s what blog seemed to be – something to talk about – to say ‘you need a blog’ to people and sit back knowing full well they wouldn’t have the faintest idea what you were talking about.
After that, the word became fairly common, but I was still unsure… after all, blogs barely exist. What is a blog? A content management system, essentially, and these already existed. It’s not necessarily an online diary – you don’t need to use it like that. It is a tool which allows you to post content onto a website, and let people post comments – if you enable that functionality. And that’s it.
Then there were the window-dressing ‘blogs’ – ministerial blogs that weren’t written by the minister but by lackeys, or BBC journalist blogs that were essentially just online columns with a few comments from people with whom I usually violently disagreed.
I also objected to the type of blog that was supposed to be the news that the mainstream media did not dare to print – in my experience, this was simply ranting from non-journalists that the mainstream media would certainly not print, but just because it was not good enough to print.
But now blogs are commonplace, and everybody with a pulse has one, I think there are some interesting uses emerging, and one is for local politicians. In the UK Mary Reid, former Mayor of Kingston, and many others have pioneered their use as a tool to connect with and keep in touch with their local constituents in a way that makes much more sense than with national politicians. They can go to local meetings, and give out their blog addresses: this gives people a follow-up, to look at photographs of the meeting they were act, and to join in a real dialogue with their local politicians and other local citizens. This is valuable for the politician, and valuable for the citizen. And it works.
So why am I blogging about blogs?
Because there is an interesting new project encouraging and helping civic leaders to blog: ‘Civic Surf’ Its driving force Shane McCracken of Gallomanor wrote an article on the project in this week’s E-Government Bulletin (email me if you want to see a copy, add ‘dan’ to ‘@headstar.com’), and the website is worth a look. It is at:
http://www.civicsurf.org.uk
There is a pack you can obtain too, with a DVD – find out more also by emailing me.
Posted in News, members | 3 Comments »
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23. July 2008 – 11:52 by Rolf Luehrs
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The UK is about to introduce identity cards from next year on. This introduction is part of the Government’s National Identity Scheme, which RT HON Jacqui Schmith MP, Home Secretary, believes to
“give us all a new way to protect ourselves and our families against identity fraud, and to protect our communities against crime, illegal immigration and terrorism. And it will help us to prove our identity in the course of our daily lives- when travelling, for example, or opening a bank account, or applying for a new job, or accessing government services.”
Needless to mention that there are a lot of different views and concerns regarding the collection and control of personal data by the government and this might be the reason why the Home Office started a consultation process on the proposals.
“I very much welcome your views on these, as well as on other aspects of our implementation plans. The conversation which begins now with a wide constituency of stakeholders will enable us to take on a broad range of experiences and ideas for defining services so that we can best meet public needs and deliver benefits” Jacqui Smith points out in her foreword to the “Delivery Plan 2008” (pdf).
Data protection activists and identity card opponents might have had the impression that this consultation process is not at all concerned with general question whether or not an identity card would be useful but just on the exact terms of the implementation. This would of cause not prevent anybody to object against the identity card at the first opportunity.
This opportunity came when the Home Office launched a “specially designed website” to discuss the national identity scheme with young people at MyLifeMyId.org. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in News, Projects, Tools | 7 Comments »
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10. July 2008 – 20:25 by Fraser Henderson - ICELE
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The Department for Communities and Local Government in the UK has recently released a new white paper on community empowerment. This White Paper sets out concrete proposals for areas where both central and local UK government can devolve more power to citizens – giving local communities the power to drive real improvements in everything from the way their neighbourhoods are policed to the way that community assets are used.
The paper hinges on the theory that ”while people want to have a greater say, they need also to be convinced that their involvement will make a difference. If they speak up, they want to know that their voices will be heard. This is what empowerment is all about – passing more and more political power to more and more people through every practical means”
My take is that “empowerment” only works if the recipient is ready, able and willing to accept it. Furthermore the notion that it is a “gift” from government is a bit archaic; power should be ‘taken’ by the community for there to be any effective consequence.
The paper does come out with a good set of actions, however. For example:-
- a duty to promote democracy to all councils (with the suggested use of blogs, podcasts and interactive websites)
- Grassroots grants” for third sector organisations
- a new duty to respond to petitions and if 5% of the local population sign then there has to be a full council debate
- petitions in other areas of public service
- all authorities encouraged to have participatory budgeting by 2012
- a call for local mayors to be directly elected
- a network of “digital inclusion advisers” who will work directly with individual local authorities and their partners and the launch of a “digital equality action plan”
- funding for media and technology (but no co-ordinating unit!)
- a digital mentor scheme in deprived areas
- the power to provide incentives for voting (e.g. prize-draw)
Sadly the digital angle is still lacking. For example, there is no duty on the use of “e”petitions and the advantages of social networking, collaberative legislation making, technologies for PB and online voter awareness are underplayed.
Alas, eParticipation remains underground for now….
Posted in News, Trends | 2 Comments »
